Even though most Americans know about the World War II internment of Japanese Americans (and Donald Trump’s prevaricating thoughts on it), the race-based anti-immigrant legacy of our nation was already cemented in the prior century. Sixty years before WWII, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first major law restricting immigration to the United States solely based on someone’s ethnicity. This racist legislation was enacted in response to irrational economic fears; native-born Americans were attributing their own unemployment and declining wages to the influence of Chinese workers (and later Japanese and all other Asian ethnicities) whom they also viewed as racially inferior. The Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law on May 6, 1882 by President Chester A. Arthur and effectively halted Chinese immigration to the states for ten years. It also prohibited Chinese people from becoming US citizens, even if they already legally resided in America.

QUESTION: Worth verifying the broader anti-Asian citizenship and immigration bans that followed this Act into the early 20th century.

DEFINE: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, signed by Chester A. Arthur, is the first major US law restricting immigration by ethnicity — it also banned Chinese citizenship and lasted ten years.

Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Gl…, loc. 745